Archive for February, 2010

“A friend of mine was amazed after watching Avatar. He couldn’t stop talking about the floating mountains. Then I said to him: ‘Man, your planet has huge mountains of water. Water! They float above your head every day and when they turn into rain, they contribute to the cycle of the most important liquid to your existence’. Most people go around without realizing the complexity, wonder and graciousness that a cloud is.” – Ibrahim César, 1001 Gatos de Schrödinger

Indeed, as Cecil Adams writes, “a good sized cumulonimbus cloud, or thunderhead, [has] a mass of roughly four billion kilograms per cloud, or the equivalent of not one but 10,000 747s.”

Just look at the image above: from a strictly fictional point of view, could there be something cooler than Nazi flying saucers fighting at the Second World War? Nazis, they are evil, and now they have flying saucers!

One of the most interesting finds by Verga in my opinion is the image at the top of this post. The comment that it would be something very cool from a fictional point of view had a reason: pay attention to the signature.

The illustration comes from Amazing Stories, published in July 1943. That’s four years before the start of the modern obsession with flying saucers, and therefore way before anyone associated them with Nazis, much less Aliens.

Nazi UFOs are not just a curious sub-area of ufology. At the early years of the field, the idea that flying saucers were very terrestrial secret weapons was one of the most popular explanation for them. Before they were Alien, they were Nazi.

Aliens didn’t even made it to the opinion poll, as the extraterrestrial hypothesis would only be widely popularized in 1950 by Donald Keyhoe.

Now, another interesting bit, Verga also remarks how even Keyhoe mentioned the story he heard that flying saucers were real… British aircraft, captured from the Nazis after the war. They were later transferred to Australia and also Canada, the story went.

Nazi UFOs: an idea so cool that it quickly jumped from Amazing Stories to… amazing stories as told by not quite amazing, and not at all original, mystery sellers.

“This Dramatic Spiral Burst known to ‘insiders’ as The Ring of Fire Fault was observed on national radar over Melbourne Australia today – but then what? Is this the HAARP smoking gun?” – Colin Andrews

Andrews, more known for his involvement with crop circles, tries very hard to work up some curious geometric patterns seen through weather stations in Australia over the last few days. They are indeed quite interesting, which gives him room to speculate about “strange weather effects, possible weather modification experiments or the secret agenda behind the global HAARP project”.

Amazingly, however, Andrews has already received and actually reproduced the quite prosaic explanations for these patterns… but he simply don’t seem to get it.

Quite literally: After a trip of 10 minutes inside this Mandelbrot fractal (be sure to check the HD version on Vimeo), the original image you saw would be “billions and billions” of times larger than the whole Universe. As the author, hd-fractals, explains:

“The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? A magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were "actually" travelling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.”